Fat, Forty & Lost!!

The whole social-networking world has gone MAD!!

Once upon a time, there was a simple telephone.  If my brother wanted to know what I had been up to lately, he'd pick up the phone.  Then we had email.  If my brothers and mum all wanted to know how christmas was with my daughter, a quick click or two, a couple of entries in the CC field, and that was that.

Now we have Social Networking where anyone who has every heard or seen your name can go and follow every inane rambling you post.  Just think, your brothers, parents, cousins, nephews, nieces, uncles-twice-removed-cousins-daughers-boyfriend, ex-partners, old posties & milko's, the tax man, ANYONE and EVERYONE can read that 'I had weetbix for brekkie'.

Just about every page you read has the ability to be added to any one of the eleventeen-hundrathousand bookmarking sites out there via a little panel of buttons.  But I wanted to approach it from a different angle.  It's all very well registering with all these sites, but how do you then let everyone know what you are connected to?  Pick up the phone??  :^)

I figured, if anyone found my site, and knew me enough to really want to know what colour undies I put on this morning, if any, they could select one of the Social Networking icons presented in mod_stalker, and follow/subscribe/whatever to my really-quite-dull-and-unimportant-drivel.

Anyway....

Stalker for JomSocial is coming very soon!

There is currently a very rough working version in the download section, and I'm working with the Azrul guys to iron out a few problems.

If you have any suggestions, ideas, problems... anything, then head over to the forum and let me know!

JoomPing is a component/module package I developed to fill a small gap I found in the whole Social Networking craze.   I, like many other techy people, seem to be registered on an abundance of these sites (twitter, pownce, plurk, kwippy etc) while everyone I know either has no interest, or maybe registered on one, but no two friends are on the same network (which explains my multiple registrations).   So I figured that the best place to post these messages, for everyone to see them, was on my own site.  Sure I could add a blog entry, but that's time consuming for a quick 'I'm eating chicken soup' type message that these social networks are popular for.

Enter Ping.fm.  Ping.fm is a site that makes life easier for people like me.  They are a 'one stop shop' for sending these status messages to all the social networking sites, whether it's from a form on their site, via an email, or via one of several IM 'bots' (ie, from withing Google Talk).  The one place they couldn't send the message was to my Joomla-based site.

So I created JoomPing.

Here we go, another useless module from yours truly.  I use it on my site, and I've been asked about it a couple of times, so I figured I'd put it here for download.  The initial release only has options for Google Talk's Chat Back and Meebo's Widget, and I've added AIM WIMZI & MSN Messenger in the latest version.  If there are any more that you want added, I can always add them in.

There's not really much more I can say about it, download it, install it, set up the widget(s) you want to display & use it if it takes your fancy!!!

If you have any suggestions, then feel free to let me know.